Charles John Read (16 February 1958 – 18 August 2015) was a British mathematician known for his work in functional analysis.
In operator theory, he is best known for his work in the 1980s on the invariant subspace problem, where he constructed operators with only trivial invariant subspaces on particular Banach spaces, especially on
l
1
{\displaystyle \ell _{1}}
.
He won the 1985 Junior Berwick Prize for his work on the invariant subspace problem.Read has also published on Banach algebras and hypercyclicity; in particular, he constructed the first example of an amenable, commutative, radical Banach algebra.
At the time of his death, Read was a Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Leeds after having been a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge for several years.